Obituary

Dakota Staton

It can be a decided virtue, from the buff's angle, to be a jazz instrumentalist hardly anyone's heard of - the obscurity all adds to the insider's cachet attached to specialist information. But this special treatment frequently does not extend to singers, particularly those walking the fine line between jazz and pop music.

The vocalist Dakota Staton, who has died in Manhattan aged 76, is hardly noted in the jazz history books and rarely mentioned by jazz fans. Though Staton, as the New York Times once put it, can be regarded as "a stylistic link between the earthiness of Dinah Washington and Big Maybelle and Chaka Khan's note-bending pop-funk iconoclasm", she was a direct and soulful blues-rooted artist who prioritised confessional simplicity above jazzy instrument-mimicking virtuosity.

Moreover, Staton self-confessedly developed in another performer's shadow - Washington's - and arrived on the scene a little later than her principal models, by which time popular tastes were moving on. But she could be a charismatic, charming, emotional and profoundly skilful performer of what came to be dubbed the "blues-ballad". Steeped in soul and church music, Staton was widely admired, even if her 1957 album The Late, Late Show was to be a high point that she was not able to repeat.

She was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and sang and danced from early childhood. She had classical singing lessons as a teenager, and studied at Pittsburgh's Filion School of Music, but then she discovered the work of the wilfully powerful R&B, soul, jazz and torch-singer Washington. Staton committed herself to the same earthy influences that underpinned the charismatic vocalist's sound.

After working in the revue Bogey Fowler's Fantastic Rhythm, Staton became lead vocalist with one of Pittsburgh's busiest early-1950s bands the Joe Westray Orchestra. After two years with Westray, Staton became a solo nightclub artist, working the US and Canada, and winding up in New York.

At Harlem's Baby Grand club, she was heard by Capitol Records producer Dave Cavanaugh and signed to the label. Staton released several singles, but an acknowledgement as "most promising newcomer" by the jazz magazine Downbeat in 1955 changed her career. It led to that jazzier recording project, The Late, Late Show, on which Staton was accompanied by the thrilling former Cab Calloway trumpeter Jonah Jones. The album's title track was a significant pop hit, but Staton revealed a swing-singer's talent for cruising freely over a jazz pulse, and an ability to transform an instrumental in her treatment of the former Count Basie vehicle, Broadway.

In the late 1950s, Staton became established as a high-profile jazz singer, sharing domination of the critics' polls with Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Washington, through such stylish recordings as In The Night (with expatriate British pianist George Shearing's group) and Dynamic, where her perfect foil was the idiosyncratic trumpet sound of Count Basie's Harry "Sweets" Edison. Staton was the star performer at a 1959 New York Town Hall concert, toured with Benny Goodman the following year, and played the 1963 Newport Jazz Festival.

But by the mid-1960s the scene was changing, and Staton's successes were dwindling. She followed her trumpeter husband Talib Dawud in converting to Islam, briefly being known as Aliyah Rabia (Dawud, Staton and jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal were briefly embroiled in ideological disagreements with Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam) and in 1965 she moved to England. She worked with European bands, including Kurt Edelhagen's sophisticated orchestra, but did not return to America until the early 1970s. At that point, in step with much of the more accessible jazz-rooted music of the period, Staton concentrated on soul-jazz and gospel styles.

She continued performing into her 60s, and in 1998 was acclaimed by the New York Times's Robert Sherman as "one of America's great vocal stylists". Staton could catch the telling balance of romanticism and defiance that a style concocted out of a mix of torchy ballads, blues and soul-music could achieve at its best, expressing the ambiguity of emotion strung across a chasm between despair and the determination to survive.

In applying methods she had learned through R&B and soul to the jazz-ballad form on songs like Love for Sale or Mean to Me, Staton could impart a distinctive character to those familiar songs, and her legacy lies in such transformations.

Dakota Staton's saxophonist brother Fred Staton survives her.

· Dakota Staton, singer, born June 3 1931; died April 10 2007

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